The Dubai Job

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In 1997 the Mossad tried to assassinate Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Hamas, by spraying a chemical agent on his ear as he walked down a street in Amman, Jordan. The mission failed—and the two Mossad members were captured—when Mashal turned in the street to greet his daughter at the moment the assassins sprayed the poison. In order to win the release of their operatives, Israel handed over the antidote to the poison and also freed from prison the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. In a humiliating blow to the agency, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to admit that the Mossad plot had been a terrible failure. For the next several years, morale within the agency plummeted, and its reputation for daring and success was tarnished.

Then, in 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tapped Dagan, a former military commander with a reputation for ruthless, brutal efficiency, to restore the spy agency to its former glory and preside over, as he put it, "a Mossad with a knife between its teeth." "Dagan's unique expertise," Sharon said in closed meetings, "is the separation of an Arab from his head." Dagan immediately announced that the Mossad would devote most of its resources to what he considered the two key threats to Israel's survival: the Iranian nuclear program and terrorism from the Iranian-supported groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The number and frequency of covert operations increased dramatically. There were several acts of sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program: two mysterious crashes of Iranian aircraft associated with the program, fires breaking out at two important laboratories, damage inflicted upon Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and the disappearance of two Iranian scientists and the killing of a third. There was also a mysterious explosion at a Syrian plant where Scud missiles were being fitted with chemical warheads, and the Mossad is credited with the discovery of a nuclear reactor in Syria, built with North Korean assistance, whose existence the Syrian authorities had managed to conceal for over five years. (The Syrian nuclear facility was subsequently destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in September 2007 after the United States proved reluctant to do so.)

The number of complex targeted assassinations carried out by the Mossad also increased under Dagan. The most high-profile of these was the elimination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's military chief. Among other terrorist acts, Mughniyeh was responsible for the bombing of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the bombings in Buenos Aires of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and a Jewish cultural center in 1994. In February 2008 his head was blown off by an explosive device that had been planted in the driver's-side headrest of his rental car. Dagan's Mossad is also believed to be responsible for the death of General Mohammed Suleiman, a close aide of Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad, who headed that country's nuclear program and handled military cooperation with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Suleiman was killed in the Syrian city of Tartus in August 2008 by a sniper's bullet that hit him as he stood on his balcony after his daily swim. (According to other reports, he was shot by the sniper as he swam in the sea with his bodyguards.)

Because of these successes, Dagan's tenure as director of the Mossad was repeatedly extended, most recently by Benjamin Netanyahu in October 2009, and today he is one of the longest-serving directors in Israel's history. Notorious for his aggressive, verbally abusive style of leadership, he is an ideologically rigid man who, according to several people inside the organization, shows the door to anyone who dares to voice an opinion different from his. As one Mossad veteran told me, "It is extremely difficult to get your opinion heard in his presence, unless it supports his. He is unable to accept criticism or even another opinion. It's almost as if he treats his opposition like an enemy." Dagan is also reported to have stated on several occasions that he does not believe there is anyone within the Mossad today who is worthy to replace him.

Several Mossad operatives who have attended meetings in Dagan's office describe a ritual that he goes through when preparing a team for a dangerous mission. During the meeting, Dagan points to a large photograph hanging on his office wall of a bearded Jew wrapped in a prayer shawl, kneeling on the ground with his arms in the air. The man's fists are clenched, and his piercing eyes look straight ahead. Next to him stand two German SS officers, one holding a club and the other a pistol. "This man," Dagan says, "was my grandfather, Dov Ehrlich." He then explains that shortly after the photo was taken, on October 5, 1942, his grandfather was murdered by the Nazis along with his family and thousands of other Jews in the small Polish town of Lukow.

"Look at this photograph," Dagan tells the Caesarea fighters. "This is what must guide us and lead us to act on behalf of the State of Israel. I look at the picture and vow that I will do everything I can to ensure that something like this will never happen again."

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010. Before dawn

The mission will be run by operatives working under the assumed names Gail Folliard, Kevin Daveron, and Peter Elvinger, who arrive in Dubai in the very early hours of the nineteenth. They immediately go to separate hotels, where Folliard and Daveron pay for their rooms in cash, but most of the other team members are using a prepaid credit card called a Payoneer, a fact that will be significant to the investigation to come. Counting the unsuccessful attempt to poison Al-Mabhouh in November, this is the team's fifth trip to Dubai in the past nine months. The purpose of the other trips was to do surveillance and to verify beyond any doubt that the man they intend to kill is indeed Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh. This is not a simple matter. Back in July 1973, a Caesarea hit team on a mission to liquidate the head of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September—the group responsible for the murders of eleven Israeli team members at the Munich Olympics—mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway. The killers were caught and spent years in jail, and the Israeli government paid substantial damages to the victim's family. The reputation of the Mossad—and of Israel—was badly harmed by the botched mission, and since then the agency has implemented complex mechanisms to ensure that they never make such a mistake again.